Reported in the 1990s

17,926 cases — 60.1% of every LPST case Texas has on file — were reported during the 1990s.

What was happening

The 1990s were the decade the federal deadline fell. Owners had to remove or upgrade their tanks, and pulling a tank out of the ground is how a leak gets discovered. Six of every ten Texas cases were reported in these ten years.

A reporting date is the date a leak was found, not the date it began. That distinction is the whole reason the shape of this file is what it is: leaks are discovered when tanks are dug up, tested or replaced, so the count rises when the rules change rather than when the ground gets worse.

181 of the 17,926 cases from the 1990s are still open — 1.0%. The oldest of them was reported in 1990, and 0 were reported in 2015 or later.

That spread matters more than the count. An open case from the 1990s usually means a long remediation that was never formally closed; one from last year means something recent. The file records the two dates and nothing else — not the substance, not the extent, not what is left to do. How to read an open case.

Where they are

Buying, lending on, or insuring a site here?

17,926 leak cases are on the Commission’s file in Texas, 181 of them still open. This site tells you a case exists; it is not an assessment. Tell us the address and we pass the request to environmental consultants who do Phase I work in Texas.

We take no commission and we recommend no consultant. We have no arrangement with any firm today — we are collecting these requests in order to go and find them. What we do with this.

The first cases reported in the 1990s

Ordered by the date the Commission recorded them — the earliest 120 of 17,926. Open cases are marked as such; a blank closing year means the file records no closure.

The other decades

• Reported in the 1980s 3,615
• Reported in the 2000s 3,061
• Reported in the 2010s 2,603
• Reported in the 2020s 1,266